The Holy Week ceremonies still remain rather crude reproductions of those which annually attract so many hundreds of visitors to Seville. But notwithstanding the existence of many learned and estimable prelates and priests, the general character of the clergy in Cuba has been indifferent, and I am afraid the Cubans have ever held the gorgeous ceremonies of their Church in greater affection than her moral teachings. Up till 1788, the Cuban Church was ruled by a single bishop, but in that year it was divided into two dioceses, each covering about one half of the island. In 1804, Santiago, the eastern diocese, was raised to the dignity of an archbishopric. The other, which contains the city of Havana, still remains a bishopric. The European revolutions of the end of the last and the beginning of the present centuries had their effect on Cuba, and a great number of monasteries and convents were closed, their inmates scattered, and their property confiscated. Unfortunately, the Inquisition, which had been implanted at an early period everywhere in the Spanish colonies, with the object of compelling the aborigines and the imported slaves to embrace Catholicism, was used as a means of overawing refractory colonists, who were soon made aware that either open or covert disapprobation of the proceedings of their rulers was the most deadly of all heresies. From the middle of the 17th century until the close of the 18th, the annals of the Havanese Inquisition contain endless charges of heresy against native-born Spaniards--charges which were in reality merely expressions of political displeasure, and had nothing whatever to do with religion. The palace of the Holy Office and its prisons, which stood close to the Church of San Domingo, were destroyed many years ago, and are now replaced by the old market-place of Cristina, once the scene of an unusual number of _autos da fé_--a favourite form of religious entertainment in South America, it would appear, for in a curious old book, dated 1683, which I picked up in Havana for a few pence, the author complains of the dull times, "nobody, not even a negro, having been burnt alive for nearly six months." A Havanese _auto da fé_, in the palmy days of Spanish supremacy, must have been quite a pretty sight, including, as it did, an allegorical procession to the place of execution, with children dressed in white as angels, and little nigger boys as devils, tails and horns complete, dancing before the condemned, who, of course, wore the traditional _san benito_, a sort of high mitre and shirt, embellished with demoniacal representations of Satan and his imps, capering amid flames and forked lightning. Then came the Governor and his court, the civil and military officials, the clergy, the monks, and the friars singing the seven penitential psalms--in a word, everything "_muy grandiose y espectacolos_."